Category: Personal

No Biggie

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

In case you were wondering, yes, I did inhale.

I think I might try to change my name by deed poll. I quite like the name Whacko McNutjob. Apparently at the Royal Courts of Justice it costs £50.32. I can already use the name but if I want it on official documents I need a Deed Poll. It tickles me, the idea of trying to file a Patent Application using the name Whacko McNutjob. It would be fun to see quasi-official stationery addressed to Mr Whacko McNutjob.

Is the domain free? Whackomcnutjob.com is today on sale for five euros. Careful how you spell that.

If I got a job on a boat out of Southampton, my address could be Mr Whacko McNutjob, Boaty McBoatface, South Atlantic, near Las Malvinas.

Perception is a weird thing. Many are easily freaked by things like cancer. To us, as a four cancer couple, it is more commonplace than to others. The odds of sampling the various probabilities twice for two people, and getting our results are not favourable, we are in an unlikely or improbable situation. It may seem like a Biggie or whopper to others. It is a simple reality to us.

To me it is no biggie that I am here on the compound. I have been here for six years. This morning I cleaned out the kitchen exhaust water degreasing unit. It is not an overly pleasant thing to do. It saved us a couple of hundred euros. This is not far off a weekly shop for us. Because we are careful with grease waste it should last now until summer next year. A lot of people would turn up their noses at doing such a whiffy thing, it would be beneath them.

What may be a biggie for some is not for others.

People may think that it should not be like this. Why not? It is how it is. No biggie.

To me it is the most normal thing in the world to write rambling blogs covering diverse themes, to have extensive dreams and to make speculations. They don’t bother anyone. According to WordPress hardly anybody reads this blog, the outer world is largely unaware and uninterested by what goes on in this little corner of the internet. The writing perhaps keeps my dementia at bay.

No biggie.

The only potential problems come IF anyone thinks things should be different or ought to be another way. IF for some reason the content here has some kind of outer-world significance.

At last the medical dance card is thinning out for summer. I can get the two-stroke strimmer out and clear some spaces. Weirdly an hour and a half of strimming seems to make by back pain less intrusive.

One item on the pre-op checklist is checked off. A few more to go.

No biggie…

Future Plans – Pre-op Chore List

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Assuming that the frequency of hospital appointments remains reduced we can start planning for the future. So far there is no “show stopper” for the pencilled in total hip replacement surgery in late autumn. There are two major appointments for which we do not yet have dates: a pre-op anaesthesia assessment and a CT cardio-angiogram. The latter is due.

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The cardiologist suggested that this would probably be ok, but nobody has imaged me thus, yet. Given they operate on frail old nannas I should be good to go. But it may advise on my increased risk. I also need a full dental 360 degree check.

It seems a long way off but when you have a big garden, scale can eat time. I have to think about doing the heavy donkey work before the operation because I will be very incapacitated for 6 weeks or so, through Christmas. No driving for me…We live alone and have to hope that the wife’s health holds. If that starts to fail we are in deep shit.

I am not a fan of last minute dot com.

Chores:

  1. Sewerage check – lift the inspection covers and use plumber’s rods to clear the 30 metres to the cess pit. Should last 3-6 months.
  2. Wood – we need to order some oven dried wood. There is probably about 1 tonne of wood left over to be sorted and sized. I may need to split the pine left over from Tempest Ciaran. Perhaps another tonne or so. I will need to break and clear two wooden pallets. These can be sized for kindling. Two palettes is about 3 months. They may need to be cut to fire-stick ready size. Perhaps I need a new splitting axe.
  3. I need to move some more earth to shore up the side of the pond which has a slow leak. A couple of loads of 250kg of dirt should help it cope with the full pond. The pond always fills to overflow with the autumn rain.
  4. Need to clean and power wash the external hallway. The swallows who nested there will head off for Africa and leave the guano behind.
  5. We need to secure someone to help out in the gardening. The maintenance pruning needs to be put on hold
  6. The pink rambler rose at 2 metres  high needs dead heading.
  7. I have strimming and mole trapping to be done. There will be one or two full property boundary strims to do at 8000 metres squared that is a bit of strimming frenzy.

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  • Indoors we need to sugar soap wash the room near the wood oven. This will provoke painting of much of the downstairs. That is a big job.
  • The downstairs floor needs to be solvent cleaned with acetone to remove dirt accumulation from excess glue. I will need to use my favourite product Mr Propre floor cleaner with a mop.
  • The upstairs kitchen needs to be floored. It is the only remaining room which we have not done already. We have floored in excess of 200 square metres.
  • It may need a lick of paint too.
  • The repaired volet boxes need cleaned and filled, painted to bring back up to standard.
  • There is one room with loose wallpaper which needs removed and new paper perhaps glued in place.

We need to figure out if I need a downstairs hospital bed. The spiral staircase looks to be a bit tricky. The loo and shower are already disabled enabled downstairs.

Do we need a bigger freezer and for me to prepare spicey foods?

Knowing the way things work here I will need a yellow bio-hazard sharps box for the used anti-coagulant syringes, which I will be self-darting.

This seems to be what the next few months looks like heading into year end.

That is probably the scope of it…

I can already use a Zimmer frame and peg about on crutches.

Where can I get a black eye patch and a parrot?

Circle Game – Merry-go-round

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There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Joni Mitchell

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This morning I had yet another scan, a CT scan to test MY diagnosis of diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH). This based on my interpretation of a lung CT scan which included data on the spinal column.

“Diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH) is a type of arthritis that affects tendons and ligaments, mainly around your spine. These bands of tissue can become hardened (calcified) and form growths called bone spurs where they connect to your bones. DISH can also cause bone spurs in your hips, knees, shoulders, feet and hands and harden bones throughout your body. 

DISH, sometimes called Forestier disease, often doesn’t cause symptoms and is usually found when you have an imaging test for another problem. Some people have pain and stiffness in their  back that may get worse over time.” 

The GP has asked the radiologist specifically so we should get a specific answer. It will then be on record and “official” if indeed the formal diagnosis is made.

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This brings to the end a flurry of medical appointments and scans. Perhaps there will be a hiatus. I have a GP appointment late next week to pull threads together. Then I have a urologist “finger” appointment to discuss my elevated prostate specific antigen (PSA) level in early August. They may order a biopsy {yippee}, but perhaps we are not there yet.  

I am due a CT cardio angiogram at some stage before the hip operation.

A number of the threads will probably go nowhere, be left with no actions.

Of late I have been wondering, “does modern medicine with its endless testing and so-called preventative measures {like statins} actually make you ill? Is it some weird self-fulfilling prophecy?”

There certainly is tendency to obsess about health engendered thereby. What are my cholesterol levels like today? Have I had too many units of alcohol?  Will I die of health related anxiety or a stress induced hypertensive episode? Is the world getting a tad obsessed by medical metrics?

Buggered if I know…

What it looks like is maybe an autumnal new hip, perhaps followed by a second in early spring assuming I can hack it. Which means in summer ’26 I might have a little less pain and a little more flexibility. I am not expecting much.

Off-compound interaction is likely to remain low and we will have to sell the house to get something smaller and more suitable. The blighty or Brittany question will raise its head. Aside from that I do not see any great shakes. I have emailed a couple of people about dreaming.

In general people are vey busy, they have lots on their plates and I am functionally irrelevant to the wider world. I am an anomaly to the mainstream. No biggie…

A recent dream has pointed at some kind of engagement with mental health. Implicit in this has to be anglophone. I am not sounding a trumpet call of excitement. The world out there is a minefield. If someone can get sacked from their high profile job for a single racist jibe whilst half pissed, it is a strange and disproportionate place. Best to say fuck all then. That is the take home message.

I know that I am largely out of touch with the younger people. I do not have any personal data on how people younger than 40 think, because I have not interacted with any. It looks such a  dangerous minefield out there and it makes me so glad that I am not in my erstwhile role in “pastoral care”.

The dreaming has not dreamed in, any vision of the future. I note that in the year 2015 when I had my colon cancer operation there were precious few dreams. Maybe as I approach surgery later, they will cease in a similar manner.

Maybe the painted ponies have stopped going up and down for a while, a brief respite, while other merry-go-round users climb aboard. Soon the garish music will start anew and the ride will begin again….

Anaesthesia Consent and DNR

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We do  have some lovely conversations in this house…

I will, early this evening, light the metaphorical blue touch paper for tomorrows procedure. It will be ten years since I had my pT3N0M0 adenocarcinoma removed. 39 lymph nodes were extracted and pathologically examined. Since then I have had numerous colonoscopies. Tomorrow I will have general anaesthetic. I will have another endoscopy. I will be shitting my arse off, tonight and tomorrow morning.

There will be Bastille Day “fireworks” chez nous.

I have to give consent in French and nowhere am I asked if I fully understand. The assumption of comprehension is one of the clinically flawed approaches here, in my opinion. Nobody checks if you understand. It is the kind of detail which bugs me. There are a lot of assumptions in France…the process is trusted. Given the quality of healthcare it might be a good tweak to make it better.

A simple question….Do you {really} understand what I am saying?

In the unlikely event of an emergency I have said that I do not want to be resuscitated if there is a danger of paraplegia or brain death. I now have an anomaly in my ECG…

Karmically if it is time, it is time. DNR, do not resuscitate.

I am anticipating that they will find some polyps which will be excised and biopsied. If the polyps are benign my next day of joy will be scheduled five years hence. If there is a need for a follow up, I will see the chimney sweep again sooner.

This kind of thing reminds you of impermanence…

The best thing is that even with a buzz cut hair cut they make you wear a groovy hair net. I will be 24 hours with no food…having been on a white-bland no-residue diet for three days…

The diet recommendations in France speak of not eating escargot, not a problem for me. The UK ones say that you can have plain naan and chapatti…

I have manged to do a “white” curry without onion or garlic, which was passable…

Pizza is on the menu for tomorrow evening with crisps….to follow…

Feeling Wired… wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie…

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But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I cannot see,
I guess an’ fear!

Robert Burns

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Well I am all wired up to a polygraph. Looks like it measures heart, noise in the trachea, air flow in the nostrils and the saturation of oxygen in the blood. It is not the latest spec machine and I don’t want to pay twenty euros for a user or technical installation manual. The temptation to take it apart is high but I will resist.

Over the last few months with nearly fifty medical appointments so far this year I have felt a little like a lab rat / mouse. Last time I was like this was around 1994 when they did shit loads of tests to figure out my low B12 and high haemoglobin. They gave me a radio-tracer labelled B12 sample and wanted me to collect my piss. I was off on a night out with the lads, by the end of the night my rucksack was very heavy with ~ a gallon of Tennent’s Extra flavoured sample. They told me to collect it all!! They were taking the piss.

I figured that I was a part of some research project at St Thomas’ so I played along. Perhaps I helped someone’s dissertation.

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I learned today that a diagnosis of moderate to severe sleep apnoea means that you have to stop driving and tell the DVLA!! You then need to get the problem under control.

They say that it can affect concentration. I’ll bet my level and extent of concentration against the bulk of the population. I’ll win.

Either the results will be invalid due to the apparatus falling off during the night, or they will be “normal” or they will have some anomalies due to my decade of dreaming practice and two and half decades of meditation. The first two cases are easy.  The third case might raise an eyebrow; be seen as an artefact or suggest a re-test.

All these scans and tests are getting a bit boring. I would much prefer to be in the control room watching the acquisitions than on the slab in the middle of a polo mint.

I have often wondered on the mentality of those able to torture mice. I did a team development course for those operating a gene related animal house {mice} at the University of Cambridge. They seemed to be regular people a bit annoyed by the unrealistic expectations of the last minute dot com academic demands. The academics wanted the animal house “sorted out”. I suggested to HR that it was the academics who needed to learn team work and to develop their interpersonal skills, which were poor.  I offered to do a course for them. Needless to say my offer to “Olympus” was not taken up. I would have had no problems calling out a pompous Cambridge prof or two.

I take the device back on Tuesday morning before my colonoscopy. We shall see {perhaps} what is recorded thereupon. The fun-filled and action-packed life goes on…

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Failure to Piss & Moan or Whinge & Complain…

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From the Urban Dictionary:

whinge

Verb To whinge

A British/Australian/New Zealand (possibly South African and other commonwealth) English word which describes incessant complaining. A behaviour commonly associated with poms/pommes/pohms/pommies (people from England).

If you want to get anything done in this country you’ve gotta whinge till you’re blue in the face!

Aw piss off ya blardy whingin’ pommie!

Whinging pom

An joyless English person who complains incessantly.

See Piers Morgan.

That Piers Morgan is such a whinging pom oh my god.

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This morning whilst trying to go back to sleep I was reflecting on a phenomenon of non-plussed. This is when I observe other people being non-plussed when I fail to piss & moan or whinge & complain in line with their normal level of their expectations. They seem not to know what to do when I don’t bemoan my lot or plead how terrible life is and how much miserable pain I am in {poor me, pass the feather boa.}


People are accustomed to hearing high levels of whinging and moaning and therefore expect these.

I have an idea that the medical profession don’t take me as seriously as others because I am not complaining endlessly and asking of their deity for help with my suffering. They can’t gauge things on the whinge / complain / moan scale.  I am too close to the zero-whinge state to be taken seriously.

As a rule most people like to have others hear there whinges and go, “there, there, poor you”. They seek someone to join them in their misery and seek affirmation of how terrible their personal suffering is, Bless.

If you observe, a fair percentage of so-called conversation is about complaint and woe-sharing. If people stopped whinging there would be a lot less. One is supposed to offer succour to the woe-sharer. If one does not woe-share people can be non-plussed. They do not know what to do or how to behave.

A very large amount of woe-sharing comes from the notion of how unfair the world is imagined to be. It is very victim and poor me in source. It is a bit sandpit or nursery, toddler like.

Who said that life is fair? Why do people have such an expectation?

Anyway, is seems to me that my failure to piss & moan, whinge & complain sufficiently leaves people non-plussed. It is a non sequitur which does not make sense. It can cause unease.

The Holy Trinity – Fat Fags & Booze

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Brixton Prison, Jebb Avenue London S.W. 2 Inglan

it was de miggle a di rush hour
hevrybody jus a hustle and a bustle
to go home fi dem evenin shower
mi an Jim stan up waitin pon a bus
not causin no fuss

when all of a sudden a police van pull up
out jump tree policemen
de whole a dem carryin baton
dem walk straight up to me and Jim
one a dem hold on to Jim
seh dem tekin him in
Jim tell him fi leggo a him
for him nah do nutt’n
and ‘im nah t’ief, not even a but’n
Jim start to wriggle
de police start to giggle

Sonny’s Lettah – Linton Kwesi Johnson

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Isn’t it funny that when you wait a long time for a bus at the bus stop near Jebb Avenue on Brixton Hill, there are none then all of a sudden three arrive at once?

Every weekday morning for around five years I waited at that bus stop.

Last Friday I had a radio-nuclide bone scan, Tuesday I had an ECG and comprehensive cardio ultrasound, tomorrow I will have overnight monitoring for sleep apnoea, Monday I will start taking industrial grade laxatives with a colonoscopy due Tuesday afternoon and next Friday I am due a CT scan to check for diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH).

What a fun-filled and action-packed time I have.  That is quite a lot to cram in. That is a lot of buses.

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Tomorrow I will get fitted for various monitoring including cardio. Later, they may go one stage further and do a hospital admission with full electroencephalography (EEG).

Given hip pain, enlarged prostate and hot weather, I am not sure they will get a good data set.

I don’t know what gizmo I am getting tomorrow. BUT if there is an EEG it could easily generate an anomaly which they may struggle to explain. I know from before and self-test that I can flat-line a fast Fourier transform frontal lobe EEG within the S:N ratio. If this happens in a sleep study it might raise questions or get ignored. I would be an anomaly.

The hospital version has EEG. It may never happen.

As a researcher one is trained to look out for anything unusual. I have a low parathyroid hormone level which seems anomalous. It makes my research bells go ting. It does not seem so important to others.

It seems to me that the consensus is coming around to the idea that the root cause of many of my ailments is being ascribed to the Holy Trinity, fat, fags and booze. My high iron levels will get adjusted during any hip operation by blood loss, in the first instance.

In terms of the Holy Trinity I only have fat left to renounce.

Whenever I watch a medical video, say on a part of the endocrine system, I think to myself that is a whole lot of variables which you are asserting to be interrelated yet you only have very few data points. Is that not a bit of a stretch?

I suspect that I would have been a shit medical student, too many questions. I would struggle with the exams.

In a fortnight’s time I should have a few more pieces of information, including my putative diagnosis of DISH.

Looking at the bus timetable there may be a wait……after a fun-filled and action-packed week.

Touch wood, cross fingers etc.

ECG Anomalies and a CT Coronary Angiogram

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Well, more rides on the medical merry-go-round are in store. I have a patchily shaved chest to which they attached the electrodes and they found some anomalies, a slight lowering, in the ST part of my ECG trace.

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These can be due to ischaemia {low blood supply} or muscular hypertrophy. The nice young man was very thorough with a good bedside manner. He has recommended that I get a CT Coronary Angiogram, a new procedure to me. So I have just emailed the request to the radio people.

He was reassuring but you don’t fork out for fancy tests on a whim. There is a reason…

My gut feeling to get the cardio MOT done early was right. I figured there could be some twists and turns.

There are a lot of medical threads out there which hopefully we can make some global sense of {eventually}.

Luckily, I know where the radiography department is, it is near the nuclear medicine place I was at Friday and close to the coffee machines.

More loyalty card points for me…

Gandalf and Felix – Our Resident Stray Cats

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Yesterday at feeding time Felix, the old beat up neutered tom, did not show. He has been looking increasingly shabby of late, the vet suggested that he has cat AIDS. He has been with us for three or four years. He was fearful and wild. Other younger cats taught him to come close to us. Of late he has let me touch him and he rubs himself up against me at feeding time. We play picky-ups, where I pick him up with my foot and drop him gently out of the way. He keeps coming back for more. It is a game he likes. You can usually set your watch to his stomach. No sign of Felix. Gandalf was fed as per usual.

This morning again no sign of Felix. Something has unnerved Gandalf the young, spayed female. She followed me around the garden like a limpet. I was looking to find a perhaps dead or injured Felix. She was very attentive and seeking physical contact. No sign of Felix. Not in any of his usual haunts.

We understand that our care of Felix is perhaps end of life and palliative.

I just went out to feed Gandalf down by the river and with all the noise Felix arrived. He is in a bad way with what looks like a blunt force wound to his head. There is a swollen open cut like a boxer’s injury. Gandalf seemed pleased to see him and yielded the bowl to him. No contest.  I came back to the house to get another bowl and she followed me, while there was food available. She mewed and followed me back down to where Felix was feeding. It was as if she was asking me to feed them both as is the usual custom.

I put her bowl down and she was edgy, hardly snacking. She kept greeting Felix who was trying to eat. I stood there and petted Gandalf a little. She had a few mouthfuls. I was standing like presidential “security” while the two cats ate. Something bad has gone down and freaked them out. In the past when scared or injured, cats have sought me out. I have taken scaredy-cats out into the dark for a late night piss. Gandalf remembers humans and some of her memories are good. Perhaps some not. She is glued to the side of the house where she feels safe at the moment.

Felix has finished eating and is out by the greenhouse for his post feed snooze. I have been to look and his left eye is closed again like a boxer. He has some kind of injury to that side of his mouth. Looks like a car or dog or fox and not a cat inflicted wound. Gandalf was again following me like a magnet and it looked as if she was getting ready to jump up into my arms. Which would be a first. I “took” her close to Felix and she quieted down a little. She knows he is poorly. At the moment they are sat close to the house near the magnolia.

It might be wise to swing by the vets tomorrow to ask what to do. That wound could go septic, it does not look clean and Felix is not washing after eating, which is something he usually does.

The cats are clearly unsettled by some kind of trauma…